Thursday, March 17, 2016

Conference review, Part 2: APS Young Investigator Colloquium

The Young Investigator Colloquium
is a satellite event for the American Psychosomatic Society Meeting. The aim is
to bring 25 young investigators together with 10 senior researchers to receive
mentorship about their research ideas. As a participant at this year’s
colloquium, I am a member of the Engel group, with Susan Lutgendorf and Redford
Williams as mentors.

Young investigators present their
research ideas for 5 minutes. This is followed by 15 minutes of feedback from
mentors and then 10 minutes of feedback from the other young investigators.
This pretty much inverts the usual ratio of presentation:feedback within a
talk. It's a nice way to take the focus of rehearsing your speech about what
you know already and bring the focus to getting more perspectives on how your
work could be different.

One point that was brought up
across the board was the potential to incorporate genetics into our work. In
the research I work on, we already have plans to look at the genetics of the
microbiota, although perhaps the human genome is something I have dragged my
heels about learning about. Another suggestion was to make better use of models
in writing grant proposals (you can’t go too wrong with more boxes
with arrows). I suppose it does no harm to get a review written before asking
for money for research, so you can include your article’s figure as well for a
cheeky self-citation. The peer review was also mutually beneficial-we discussed
topics such as trade-offs between using double-blind design and completing a trial
quickly if placebos take a long time to produce, employing mixed methods with
qualitative methods and chasing different sources of funding.

When many conferences are talk-poster-talk-sponsor table-talk, it is
forward-thinking to have a more active learning activity like this, not to
mention generous of mentors to give up half a day for the event.I don’t think my project will undergo
a sea change as a result of the Colloquium. However, I don't this was really
the aim; one of the objectives was to improve the writing of our research
proposals, as well as critiquing the research ideas themselves. It does seem a
pity that close collaborations between people in our group didn’t seem to
suggest themselves by the end of the half day, but then there was a diversity
in our research topics as well as underlying similarities. Later in the
conference we were treated to lunch with the mentors. It was a good chance
for the organisers to plug next year's meeting. Given that it will be at the
closer venue of Seville Spain, and as Colloquium participants get free
registration for the following year, I'm inclined towards attending.